Advances in hardware and software storage systems, networks, and search engines have made the Internet a vast source of information. Network users now have mechanisms for searching and communicating on virtually any topic of interest.
Corporate entities have long recognized the benefits of internal (or enterprise) networks for the communication of information for any desired purpose. Network systems such as web services, once reserved for the Internet, can now be utilized as information access and distribution systems in the corporate environment. Corporate networks can now support collaboration systems, conferencing systems, social networks, etc., where multiple users can login and share information and data of many different types.
In many corporate enterprise content management systems, there can be multiple different versions (e.g., two) of the same document visible at the same time. For example, where two versions are utilized, these document versions can be referred to as checked-in and checked-out, published and unpublished, major and minor, etc. A point is that a single data object (or document) can have multiple different views (e.g., two). Accordingly, queries against the enterprise data store will typically query against the version of the document to which the user has rights. In other words, if the user has rights to the unpublished version, only the unpublished version should be returned. If the unpublished version does not match the query, but the published version does, the published item should not be a part of the result set.
In order to have a performant dynamic enterprise web server application it is desirable to have trimmed result sets available for display to the user. However, in such large environments, there can be multiple authors preparing documents and at different levels. Moreover, users who login are typically restricted to viewing only major (or published) documents or objects, since the query is executed against only major documents. A problem is that there can be many minor documents that also can be of interest to the user.